Ever increasing power densities and ever decreasing sizes of today's computer systems produce new challenges in properly cooling the computer systems. Current approaches to cooling the computer systems include linking an actuator or a group of actuators with a set of sensors. For instance, commercial notebook computers are known to use a fan and a sensor. The sensor is typically a digital thermal sensor (DTS) embedded into the CPU die.
Under this configuration, the sensor relays sensed data to a thermal control chip, which controls the speed on the fan based on a predetermined threshold. The fan speed and air flow relationship is typically available in a lookup table and the sensor triggers the fan on or off, or based on discrete steps (20%, 50%, 100%). In this regard, control over the fan is based solely on the temperature detected by the sensor. This cooling of the computer systems under current approaches is therefore reactive to the detected conditions in the computer systems. As such, current cooling approaches are relatively inflexible and do not afford users with the ability to tailor how they use the computer systems.